Partitioning a hard drive.
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How do you set windows to have its Program Files on another partition to the Windows installation then? I have an 80gb drive as my master, and a 160 as a slave, i'd prefer to use more of the 80gb drive but dont want to bog the thing down, so would like to partition it myself too 
Chris, when installing your programs, just install them to the other drive. Windows XP needs 4-5gig max and thats being generous, so I would just have all my programs running off one drive and files on the other, its what I do now.
The only real benefit to doing this, is if you get a virus and end up having to re-install windows, you can format JUST the partition, leaving all your other files intact and you won't have to mess around with them. However, it doesnt help if your hard drive gives up.
The only real benefit to doing this, is if you get a virus and end up having to re-install windows, you can format JUST the partition, leaving all your other files intact and you won't have to mess around with them. However, it doesnt help if your hard drive gives up.
Ahh! Never looked at it from that point of view.... i tend to flatten XP every couple of months anyway, so that would be handy.
Forgive my Windows Cluelessness tho, but would a new install of windows on that partition not lose all of the registry info for the installed apps etc or does it not work like that? (or would it be best to ghost the windows partition once everything is installed?)
Forgive my Windows Cluelessness tho, but would a new install of windows on that partition not lose all of the registry info for the installed apps etc or does it not work like that? (or would it be best to ghost the windows partition once everything is installed?)
Yeah all apps would have to be installed again, but at least all your data should be preserved on the other partition. I use Ghost a lot and have never had any problems with it, I tend to build the machine up and then ghost an image to another hd, you can of course burn an image to cd/dvd or network drive which is what happens on big corporate rollouts with sysprep. I also currently use a RocketRaid pci raid controller <?40 with basic RAID 1, mirroring which is great, if a disk dies you just pop another one in and it rebuilds the array automatically.
With that kind of space I would have a "backup" partition or drive.
Once you have installed your OS and all your apps - take a ghost image of the system drive (with apps installed too) and store that image on a hidden partition of its own.
That way if you ever do need to reinstall your OS and apps, its a 10/20 minute job to restore the entire job lot.
The idea came from a system I was developing at my old place of work, allowing engineers to rebuild machines remotely - or indeed provide a tool that let end users rebuild their own machine back to a standard OS ad set of apps without the need for an engineer visit.
Redirect your my documents folder to another partition, and hey presto - rebuilding your machine and keeping your files is simple from now on.
Once you have installed your OS and all your apps - take a ghost image of the system drive (with apps installed too) and store that image on a hidden partition of its own.
That way if you ever do need to reinstall your OS and apps, its a 10/20 minute job to restore the entire job lot.
The idea came from a system I was developing at my old place of work, allowing engineers to rebuild machines remotely - or indeed provide a tool that let end users rebuild their own machine back to a standard OS ad set of apps without the need for an engineer visit.
Redirect your my documents folder to another partition, and hey presto - rebuilding your machine and keeping your files is simple from now on.
We have done this for years. As a company we are very geographically distributed. Each user is given a boot CD with Ghost on that automatically backup their system partition onto a hidden partition (the boot disc also allows them to recover the drive). They run this once a month or just before an install of fresh software. The users data drive is backed up via Veritas remotely to a central location, also the ghost images are backed up for some at risk users. We also use Marimba to push out new software. This generally works quite well.
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The only problem with that approach is total hard disk failure. Best way to implement would be to use your old 20 or 40GB disk as a secondary and ghost the image to that drive once you have all your base settings and software installed. That way if the drive failes or Windows goes *** up you are covered. I've seen too many hard drives fail to rely on a 2nd partition on a single drive to recover from.
Gives you something to use that old drive for too.
Gives you something to use that old drive for too.
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And there is me thinking that t-i-t-s up is a technical term, wouldn't concider it as a swear word after all what happens if you see a blue tit in the garden and want to tell everyone about it.
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Oh OK so a family of tit s is a problem then - LOL
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